Turn the dread of bookkeeping
into seamless operations.
Totals Business is an intelligent finance ally for SMBs: receipts, reconciliation, bookkeeping and cash, handled automatically, offline, and private.
This is how a business keeps its books today.
Digital receipts saved as photos. Payment references written by hand. Records forwarded over chat. Confirmations done by phone call. Then someone adds it all up, and hopes it agrees.
- Was this receipt already logged? Is it even real?
- How much of that was a tip, and whose?
- Was the cash surplus returned, or pocketed?
- Which items are selling, and which sit stale on the shelf?
Painful, recurring, and daily; it only gets worse across multiple branches.
The cost isn't the wasted hour. It's the money that leaks where no one's watching.
The mechanisms are universal, and they bite hardest at the informal, cash-heavy end of the market.
Sources: ACFE Report to the Nations 2026; spreadsheet-audit research; Flagright; EPI. US/global figures: treat as mechanism, not local magnitude.
Digital money is exploding. The tools to run a business on it barely exist.
Payments raced ahead. Bookkeeping, reconciliation, and inventory for the small merchant are open ground.
Sources: Ethio Telecom H1 FY2025/26; Capital Ethiopia (M-Pesa); Birr Metrics (POS/ATM); Findex 2025 / Shega.
And formalization just became law.
Ethiopia's Electronic Invoicing Directive No. 1142/2026 (signed June 2026) mandates real-time e-invoicing, phased in for taxpayers who keep books of accounts. Read closely, it validates exactly what we're built on.
Offline continuity: codified
The law defines an “Offline Business Continuity System” and makes offline capability mandatory for retail food, beverages & pharma, our exact sectors.
Data portability: required
Accredited software must let the taxpayer export, migrate, and delete their data at any time. We already treat the data as the owner's.
SaaS subscription: a lane
The directive recognizes “Software-as-a-Service on subscription” as an accreditation path, the exact model we plan to run.
The object it governs is the receipt, not the payment: adjacent to the reconciliation we already do, and moving merchants toward exactly what we build.
Private today. Compliant tomorrow. On their terms.
You can't be invisible to the taxman and the accredited register for the same sale, so we do both, as one opt-in switch.
Tailwind, not headwind; the directive requires the two things we already are: offline-resilient and portable by the owner.
We already earned trust with their money.
Totals Business isn't a cold start. It stands on a live consumer app that people already trust to parse their bank SMS: offline, private, no sign-up.
Google Play Console, 28 days to Jul 21 2026; GitHub: 262★, MIT.
The same engine, promoted to the shop counter.
Our consumer wedge (every payment SMS parsed the moment it lands) becomes reconciliation that happens in the moment, not at month-end.
The smallest set of modules that removes today's work, each earning the next.
Finance first. Inventory and the rest come once the reconciliation spine is trusted, never a tool that just re-creates the typing.
Reconciliation
Every payment maps to an order; live money-in / out / pending across every rail and cash.
First paid moduleTips & cash
Per-shift pooling and split on an auditable record; tracks whether a cash surplus was returned or retained.
Orders & receipts
Waiter → order → payment. Generated receipts that can't be forged or double-logged.
Sales insight
Best/worst sellers and peak hours in plain language, the read owners want but can't produce.
Inventory later
Low-stock alerts and stale-stock flags: the “what sits on the shelf” question, answered.
Staff · light HR later
Shifts and per-staff performance tied to sales. A retention layer, not a launch feature.
Multi-branch later
Every location's pending orders and abnormal patterns on one phone, past the “wall at three locations.”
Payments & credit later
Accept on the rails that exist; then turn the recorded books into working-capital credit.
Everyone under-serves the same thing: offline, honest, cash-aware.
Hover / tap a card for the lesson.
Free books, one fragile revenue arm
Never monetize on a single FX-exposed bet
Free POS, but stock & refunds die offline
Make offline genuinely full-featured
Hardware-bound, no true offline
In volatile markets, offline is table stakes
Recordkeeping → embedded lending
Bookkeeping data → credit is the proven ledger monetization
Payments-led, then business tools
Distribution through people beats app-store discovery
Lock-in, hidden fees, surprise rates
Transparent, month-to-month pricing is itself a wedge
Free wins the merchant. Paid keeps the books honest.
A freemium wedge into a tiered subscription, priced on the outcome that already costs merchants the most.
Free wedge
Capture & basic reconciliation that removes the daily pain on day one. Time-to-value under a day.
Distribution engineSubscription tiers
Reconciliation, tips & cash, multi-branch: a periodical pay, not charged per interaction, with clear figures and usage.
First paid: reconciliationPayments & credit later
The durable engine: accept on existing rails, then working-capital credit on the recorded books (the OZÉ path).
Never a single FX-exposed betSMBs are 90% of businesses and half the world's jobs.
A large, stacked market: hundreds of thousands of high-traffic merchants already holding mobile money, with no operating layer built for them.
SMB share: World Bank / ILO. Merchant count: Ethio Telecom. National magnitudes directional; a dedicated bottom-up sizing is the next work.
From flying blind into live truth.
The businesses your economy runs on, finally legible, on their terms. A private finance ally today; the on-ramp to a formal economy tomorrow, built on an app people already love.